Veritas Aequitas wrote: ↑Thu Jun 11, 2020 10:06 am
You cannot deny the following;
99.99% black is 0.01% white.
and the other combinations.
Thus 99.99 true is 0.01 falsehood.
Yes I can, it's definitely wrong. Which sort of wrong is a matter of understanding how you are framing your example though.
I wouldn't contest that the albedo of a surface could be measured using calibrated equipment and certified as 99.99% non reflective with a remainder of 0.01% reflected, and I am not in the optical sciences, but if the reflected light is spread out equally across the visible spectrum then we can allow whiteness. That doesn't create a 0.01% falsehood though. What results from that measurement is a factual statement, there is no percentage of truth just because there is a percentage of reflection.
If on the other hand your measuring device is humans and their opinions about the blackness or whiteness of an object, somebody is just plain wrong there. Not some fake percentage of wrong, they are entirely wrong. If the shade of the surface is sort of somewhere between grey and black, something oblique enough that not everyone agrees it is black, then any assertion of white is 100% nonsense.
If lighting conditions make it impossible to tell whether some object is black or white, the experiment is generating unreliable data and there is no basis to assert any probability at all in that circumstance.
There are colours which normal people don't always agree on, with some shades that look brown to one viewer but are clearly orange as far as some other is concerned. In those cases, it is quite probable that some authority has assigned colours not by visual inspection, but rather by assigning certain wavelength boundaries between the official colours. From the perspective of that official framework, it is entirely possible to say "that is orange and Pantone agree with me so it is an offical fact". The other person can even agree with this and opt to abide by Pantone's ruling, yet they still see that colour as brown, and their assent to a convention that this is not what the colour is, doesn't change that, nor does it really make them wrong. Our concepts of seeing-as are unaffected by this, and the concept of probability is irrelevant here in any case.
You can have a picture of a dress where people see-as radically different colours to each other (black and gold vs blue and something, we all know the photo I am half-remembering). In that case, it's totally cool either way, you can describe it as each pairing according to what you see in that photo, and under different conditions you see it as the other and thus describe it as the other. I don't actually care whether people decide the matter by saying one view is wrong because if you look at it under normal conditions everyone agrees it is red and yellow. Or they can use one of the other resolution strategies, the seeing-as happened the way it did at the time, and the seeing-as can happen a different way at some other time.
Much more importantly, there is a strong connection between the science of optics and the way we do actually see, we can allow for that science to resolve disputes over colour and shade because it so well tracks our experiences, so if people want to agree there is a true colour of something, that is completely legitimate even though it is a truth by convention, not an external objective fact. Totally measurable features of light and eyeballs directly determine how we see stuff.
The science of morality you propose has no chance of doing the same. We can all agree on some very basic stuff, everybody understands that unequal division is unfair if there are no other factors. If you tell a moral story about 3 children divvying up a basket of apples and all the children get the same number of apples, that is intuitively fair, and if one child gets all the apples but the others get none, that is intuitively unfair, as long as there are no reasons to explain any of that. But if you could actually build a true and indisputable moral framework from such elements, it would have happened already, and it defintitely hasn't been done. There is, as I already aknowledged somewhere, at least some biological element in morality, it is necessary for our brains to be wired up in such a way that we can percieve the basic ingredients from which the cake is baked - equity, loyalty, empathy and so on. There is something for you to get some facts about in all of that, but you will still be prevented from proceeding to generate moral truths that go beyond banal tautology even if you put in a bit more effort and get better facts than those you are wielding in your clumsy arguments in other threads.
The problem is that morality will still boil down to subjectivity becasue it is all about the seeing-as within that inescapable framework of evolved biological stuff (becasue evolution is unplanned you see), and there are too many occasions where something can be seen by one person as a duty, but by another as disloyalty. You cannot distil morality down to a single variable in the way you can with light, and in any case you cannot measure the variables at all, they have no physical propoerties to measure, applying stupid made up percentages to them is no substitute. If you try to define an action as 99.99% charity 0.01% selfishness you will be making zero sense still.